Grants Database

The Foundation awards approximately 200 grants per year (excluding the Sloan Research Fellowships), totaling
roughly $80 million dollars in annual commitments in support of research and education in science, technology,
engineering, mathematics, and economics. This database contains grants for currently operating programs going
back to 2008. For grants from prior years and for now-completed programs, see the annual reports section of
this website.

Grants Database

To build community and consensus among Administrative Data Research Facilities by serving as a network hub and convener

Program
Economics

Initiative
Empirical Economic Research Enablers (EERE)

Sub-program
Economic Institutions, Behavior, & Performance

Investigator
Robert Groves

This grant funds a dozen conferences to be held over two years that are designed as community-building exercises for a new Administrative Data Research Network (ADRN). The ADRN is a linked network of Administrative Data Research Facilities, research centers devoted to facilitating the use of administrative data by researchers by lowering transaction costs and increasing the reproducibility of research conducted on administrative data. Conference topics will focus on common difficulties encountered when working with administrative datasets, including securing data access, privacy and anonymity, data ethics, documenting and versioning data, data use agreements, and archiving. Conference outreach will target not only researchers, but key officials in government and industry who have access to administrative data. If successful, these conferences will serve as important gatherings to build consensus around standards, priorities, and best practices in the growing community of researchers working with administrative data.

To continue core support for a research network that promotes the rigorous empirical study of economic issues in North America

Program
Economics

Initiative
Empirical Economic Research Enablers (EERE)

Sub-program
Economic Institutions, Behavior, & Performance

Investigator
Amy Finkelstein

Though considered by most economists to be the gold standard method for testing hypotheses, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are nonetheless difficult to design, implement, or interpret in the field. That is why the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) was founded at MIT in 2003. J-PAL has been a staunch champion of RCT methods, providing funds and expert guidance in the design and implementation of RCTs. Initially focused on developmental economics, the J-PAL network expanded its focus to the U.S. with the 2013 launch of J-PAL North America. The goal of this new network is to promote rigorous study of economic issues in the United States and its neighbors, both by catalyzing high-quality research directly and by strengthening the capacity of institutions and individuals to conduct and understand such work. This grant provides three years of core operating support for J-PAL North America’s activities. Supported activities include salary support for core J-PAL staff, publication costs, training expenses, and development of workshops and toolkits for researchers wishing to field RCTs in North America.

To facilitate data access by developing a broadly accepted system of researcher credentialing

Program
Economics

Initiative
Empirical Economic Research Enablers (EERE)

Sub-program
Economic Institutions, Behavior, & Performance

Investigator
Margaret Levenstein

Suppose you, as a researcher, have succeeded in wrangling important and sensitive data from a government or corporate source, data that is valuable to the research community. Because your data are sensitive, however, you want to share only with appropriately trained and responsible scholars who can be trusted to treat the data ethically. Suppose now a request comes in from someone who wants to study the data. What do you do? Not every researcher is savvy about the technical, privacy, or legal compliance issues related to sensitive administrative data. You could investigate the individual and draft an agreement for them to sign. But starting from scratch to answer each new request, with all the associated inefficiencies, is time consuming and costly. Wouldn’t it be much better if you could begin instead by asking your data seeker for some standard researcher certification, a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that would indicate what kind of training and track record they have?
This grant funds a project by Maggie Levenstein, executive director of the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), to design, test, implement, and promote just such a researcher credentialing system for use by her own and other institutions holding sensitive administrative data. The widespread adoption of such a system could significantly decrease the transaction costs associated with access to administrative data, increase the analysis of important though sensitive datasets, and promote responsible training and research protocols concerning preregistration, anonymization, reproducibility, and other research practices.

To hire, house, and manage the initial coordinator for a network of administrative data research facilitators

Program
Economics

Initiative
Empirical Economic Research Enablers (EERE)

Sub-program
Economic Institutions, Behavior, & Performance

Investigator
Dennis Culhane

One goal of the Foundation’s grantmaking in economics is to lower barriers that impede obtaining and using naturally occurring datasets for sound and reproducible research. One strategy is to identify, strengthen, and, in some cases, create intermediaries who can manage the relationships between data generators and academic researchers. We refer to such an intermediary as an Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF). These facilities will, in turn, work more effectively if they can be linked together into a network that facilitates the sharing of standards, best practices, and data among ADRFs. Such networks, however, require a dedicated coordinator to ensure their proper functioning. This grant to the University of Pennsylvania provides two years of (partial) salary support for a network coordinator devoted to servicing the growing needs of the ADRF community. Although this network organizer will work with various ADRFs, he or she will be initially hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy (AISP) project, headed by Dennis Culhane. AISP has emerged as a leader in developing practical procedures and protocols for conducting research that uses administrative data and is thus well positioned within the community to successfully host this important position.

Better management of the economy requires better macroeconomic models that can be used to predict the consequences of this or that economic policy choice, proposal, or regime. Better economic models, in turn, require the ability to compare, contrast, and evaluate the predictions of various models across a variety of scenarios. How do professional economists, financial regulators, and central bankers compare one macroeconomic model to another? As it turns out, they don’t. Not only are there no widely accepted ways to compare models, there is little agreement about what criteria make one model better than another.
Enter economist Volker Wieland, who is approaching this problem head-on. Collaborating with a wide network of economists in Europe and the U.S., Wieland has developed what he calls the Macro Model Database (MMD), a software platform that can upload, store, and run different macroeconomic models, allowing researchers to confront models with the same historical or synthetic scenarios and compare the predictions subsequently produced. Funds from this grant support a project to make the Macro Model Database fully open source, documenting and disseminating the underlying code to any expert interested in using it. By making it easier for researchers to upload and explore models, Wieland and his team (including Stanford economist John Taylor) plan to double the number of models available on its platform. Additional grant funds support the establishment of a research network based at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London to further promote the MMD’s use within the research community.

To facilitate workforce research by brokering, combining, documenting, and making available for study administrative data about labor markets from a variety of sources

Program
Economics

Initiative
Empirical Economic Research Enablers (EERE)

Sub-program
Economic Institutions, Behavior, & Performance

Investigator
Matthew Gee

This grant supports a project by data scientist Matthew Gee and labor economist Iona Marinescu to create an administrative data research facility that will compile high-quality private administrative data on various aspects of the U.S. labor force. Gee and Marinescu’s Workforce Data Initiative will partner with private firms that have valuable administrative data on U.S. workers, including ADP, LinkedIn, Glass Door, O*Net, and CareerBuilder, combine these datasets with relevant publicly available data, and modify and “munge” these data into forms useable by researchers. The resulting datasets will constitute a valuable new resource for economists looking to answer pertinent questions on a host of important issues, including the post-2008 economic recovery, the resilience of local job markets, patterns in layoffs, and wage stickiness.

To improve the credibility of empirical economics by turning best-practices for research transparency into common practice for research practitioners

Program
Economics

Initiative
Empirical Economic Research Enablers (EERE)

Sub-program
Economic Institutions, Behavior, & Performance

Investigator
Esther Duflo

This grant supports an initiative by Esther Duflo at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to infuse more rigorous methodology into empirical economics. Mobilizing J-PAL’s formidable research and training programs, Duflo will promote practices such as preregistration of experiment plans; prepublication re-analysis of results; and open sharing of datasets, code, and supporting documentation. Funded activities include a series of graduate fellowships for economics students who work on enhancing reproducibility and the development with MIT of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on best economics research practices.

To improve teaching and research in quantitative economics by developing codebases and other resources that are compelling, open, and reproducible

Program
Economics

Initiative
Empirical Economic Research Enablers (EERE)

Sub-program
Economic Institutions, Behavior, & Performance

Investigator
John Stachurski

Funds from this grant provide three years of support for the continued development of QuantEcon.org, an online resource for code, data, tutorials, and lectures on quantitative economic modeling. The brainchild of economists John Stachurski of Australian National University and Thomas Sargent of New York University, QuantEcon provides open source modules for economists seeking to model a variety of economic phenomena, covering topics from asset pricing to optimal savings. Grant funds will support a variety of improvements to the site, including the addition of 20 new lectures, an innovative data portal, an open notebook archive, and expanded code libraries. Additional funds will support efforts to move the site toward independent sustainability and to connect its offerings to other economic research institutions.
Funds for the development of QuantEcon have been granted to NUMFocus, a nonprofit organization that provides administrative, operational, and strategic support to scientific software projects.